Clyst Vale Community College Combats Cyber Bullying
Email filtering software helps to create secure learning environment
Clyst Vale Community College, situated in a small village close to Exeter, is a large education provider serving 1,000 pupils, 160 further education students and 130 staff.
The Challenge
As email became increasingly important for internal communications among staff and pupils, Clyst Vale’s IT department needed a way to control what was coming into the college’s network. They also needed a system that could report on the email usage among students and provide an easy way to ensure that students were not over using email to the detriment of other educational activities.
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The IT department was also concerned about the potential risk of cyber bullying among students as well as attacks targeted at teachers and staff members. Staff wanted a proactive solution that could pick up inappropriate and offensive emails before they landed in the recipient’s inbox. Forum Of Private Business Urges Government To Boost Credibility Of Apprenticeship Schemes
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“Our challenge was to provide the students and staff at the college with a safe working and learning environment but also allow them to have appropriate access to resources,” comments Clyst Vale’s IT Manager, Graeme Lee “We wanted a solution that could provide us with a comprehensive and meaningful report on email activity within the college; that would support over a thousand users and could be centrally managed by the IT team”.
The Solution
More than ten million students worldwide are already protected by M86 Security’s email and Web security products and consequently MailMarshal Exchange was recommended for analysing the content of emails sent to and from the College.
“Following the recommendation, we decided to look at potential vendors and after much research we decided that MailMarshal Exchange would fully fit our needs.
We installed MailMarshal Exchange software across the site to protect 450 PCs and 1,200 users.” said Lee. “The deployment had to take place whilst the system was live and not affect the email flow, which meant the planning stage was crucial to the success. The solution worked straight out of the box making it easy for the IT team to install and there was no time wasted getting it to work within the College’s network”. “The IT team is now able to monitor email activity, controlling bandwidth consumption and helping maintain a consistent and reliable network by preventing excessive email use among students. In addition, MailMarshal’s real-time virus scanning and ability to block suspicious attachments and blended attacks, perpetrated via malicious links in spam email, has allowed the IT team to stop malware entering the network via email and being spread internally.”
MailMarshal Exchange enabled Clyst Vale Community College to enforce its acceptable email usage policy and meet its obligation to provide a secure and safe working environment for the students and staff, free from harassment via inappropriate or offensive emails.
“MailMarshal Exchange also provided the IT team with the comprehensive and customisable reporting system needed to establish the top three email users within the college and also view any potential email abusers through detailed security reports” comments Lee. “The blocking of inappropriate language has helped us catch emails containing offensive or threatening words and has enabled us to investigate the possibilities of cyber-bullying and also physical bullying.”
Educating students
MailMarshal Exchange has enabled Clyst Vale’s ICT staff to support the College’s acceptable email use policy by preventing the transmission of messages that flout the rules and sending a message failure notification to the sender, explaining why his or her email has been blocked. This has helped the College to reinforce its education in appropriate email usage and provided students with a valuable lesson in how to communicate over email to their teachers, staff and their own peers. The approach supports the ethos of the College, as learning online etiquette is vital for preparing students to communicate via email once they enter the workplace.
The IT team at Clyst Vale is so confident in the MailMarshal Exchange solution that it is planning to increase the number of licences as the College expands.
For further information, please telephone: 01256 848080 or go to: www.M86Security.com
